Prophecy 2006

I haven't had occassion to fiddle with the timeouts on Propehcy before this week. I'm in the middle of an interesting project and I wanted to try some ideas.

The first problem is with the VoiceXML spec itself, which does not allow parameterization of timeouts. That is, a "record" with an attribute of "silencetimeout" takes the value "750ms", but you can't put a parameter in its place. That's annoying, but I can work around that by using PHP. (And I'm embarrased to admit that I completely forgot that the spec was written that way.)

But after that I entered the platform issues, and I've been having a bit of trouble. I can't tell without more digging, but it seems that timeouts start earlier than I'd expect. That is, if I set an initial half-second timeout, it's over well before I can possibly say anything. I have been wondering if the timeout counter starts during the prompt; I'll be doing experiemnts to see what happens.

If anyone has comments about how well timeouts work on Prophecy, and tips/tricks for optimizing perfomance, I'd be obliged.